Analysts and Industry Participants Share Insight Into the Future of Mobile Security and Biometrics

"The Time Is Now Right for Biometric Technology to Emerge as a Secure Solution for Mobile Applications"- Jean-Noel Georges, Frost & Sullivan; Last Year Goode Intelligence Predicted That Mobile Biometric Security Will Move From "an Interesting Concept" to a "Must-Have" Feature for All Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs)

Additionally the CEO of an industry newcomer NXT-ID, Inc. (Quote), shares his perspective on the future of biometrics for identification and verification.

Last year Goode Intelligence predicted that mobile biometric security will move from "an interesting concept" to a "must-have" feature for all smart mobile devices (SMDs). His predictions have come to fruition.

Alan Goode, Managing Director of GoodeIntelligence.com, recently shared his insight with Investorideas.com, telling us, "I believe that the main driver for adoption of biometrics into consumer electronic devices is the mass adoption of smart mobile devices and the challenges this poses for strong authentication and identity verification -- in other words how do we securely prove identity on a mobile device without affecting the user experience. Passcodes and One-Time-Passwords are not the most convenient way to prove identity on a mobile device, especially when we are on the move. As more and more of our daily lives are being managed by these devices, having to authenticate using technology that was designed for a personal computer and a keyboard is becoming undesirable."

"What Apple has done with Touch ID is to improve the usability of identity verification on mobile devices -- to make it more convenient."

He also sees biometrics playing a key role in other technology, saying "There is a move to make authentication and identity verification on mobile devices more convenient and biometrics can provide a solution to this. This includes many biometric modalities including fingerprint, voice, facial and eye verification technologies. We predict that we shall see a marked increase in consumer technology supporting biometric authentication. Not just mobile phones, but smart TVs, games consoles, cars and wearable technology. Take a look at the latest Xbox console, Xbox one -- it supports voice and facial recognition. Multi-factor biometric authentication can support many endpoints and ensure that we have a continuous experience when we switch between endpoints (NOTE: Take a look at this video from Nuance for a glimpse into what can happen with cross-platform voice recognition)." (http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/08/how-nuance-tapped-the-cloud-to-bring-voice-recognition-to-mobile/).

Mr. Gino M. Pereira, Chief Executive Officer of NXT-ID, Inc. (Quote) said, "Over the past couple of years it has become apparent that simple password protection is not sufficient in today's increasingly sophisticated hacking world. Now giants such as Apple and Google (Quote) are publically saying so. The next few years will see increasing usage of all different forms of biometrics for identification and verification. One day somewhere in the future we will have transparent access to our homes, cars, computers and other devices simply by being in proximity to them and being recognized biometrically. It will be simple, seamless and more secure."

The first product the company is launching later this year is the Wocket™, a unique technology with a very different approach to payment security. Instead of replacing the wallet, they are aiming to improve upon it. The Wocket™ reduces the number of cards in your wallet by replacing them with a single programmable card and is capable of supporting virtually every payment method currently available at Point-of-Sale (POS) at retailers around the world including magnetic stripe, touchless payments and barcodes...all within a secure vault within a wallet.

Analyst Jean-Noel George from Frost & Sullivan recently said, "Protecting the mobile device itself is a first step, necessary to secure mobile payments. Although a personal identification number (PIN) can do the job, in 2011 more than 60 percent of smartphone users were not using a PIN to protect their mobile access."

"The time is now right for biometric technology to emerge as a secure solution for mobile applications that require high levels of security, particularly payment," said Mr. Georges. "From a pure-payment security point of view, biometrics has already delivered significant advantages."

Investorideas.com asked him how long he thinks it will take for NFC or touchless payments to be in widespread use for payments in the US and what percentage of credit card holders in the US currently use NFC to make payments and how does he see that number changing over the next 5 years?

He noted, "For the payment industry, the US market moved directly from magnetic stripe payment card to contactless payment cards. The infrastructure (POS, ATM) are being changed to accept contactless payment cards in the US. Major industry players (financial institutions, MNOs, OEM handset vendors) are deeply involved in the NFC technology. We can also add ISIS as a perfect driver for a US massive roll out. But the reality is different, and having NFC capabilities on your smartphone, does not automatically generate end user massive adoption and usages. I do not see NFC in the US as an important means of payment before 2015."

"If you are back to the means of payment industry, it took 2 decades in Europe to move from cash/coins to EMV card payment. In the US, it will take time for the end user to move from the well known bank card to a NFC mobile payment."

In discussing how the wallet war shifting to an MPOS war he said, "Many players already entered to the wallet war (software vendors, banks, financial institutions) without a real leader. I can see the same business orientation coming to the mPOS. Many players are entering to this market with a plethora of solutions, but at the moment none took the lead. For SMB and SME, there is a real value added to use mPOS instead of traditional POS hardware. They just need to add a small add-on (most of the time for free) and they will be charged a little more than traditional fees but only based on their sales. Some business models have fixed fees based on your sales amount. So you have to pay even when you did not sell anything, which is not comfortable for the retailer. The platform to be used is your own device (smartphone and/or tablet)."

Commenting on Apple's recent acquisition of Authen Tec fingerprint biometric technology Jean-Noel said, "Fingerprint recognition made lot of progress in terms of quality, speed and of price (as finger print readers were not doing perfect recognition. New ones are doing several pictures of your finger to obtain a better result). Apple just confirmed the rumors were referring to. The quality level of fingerprint technology reached a sufficient level at that time. So I don't think that a multimodal solution for basic application will be a major trend in a short time. I heard about Validity Sensors Inc doing the same."

In terms of industry growth he told us, "We are forecasting for Europe a EUR 151 billion in 2017, and EUR 502 billion in 2017 globally. Once again, mobile payment included for us, SMS, USSD, online payment, NFC, P2P and cloud based payment. I can see that Identity Access Management (IAM) is one of the biggest growth opportunities for the security mobile industry. We are forecasting 1.14 billions smartphone devices in 2017 with associated revenue of $371 billion."

Noting key trends for investors following the mobile payment and mobile security space he commented, "IAM will be key for mobile security. I saw that to overpass the lack of adoption and the complex ecosystem, many players are using cloud based credential for payment. Cloud solutions for payment are definitively a trend to follow. You have cost efficiency, easy to use and a sufficient security level. Cloud will be strategic in the future. Apple already mentioned that biometric data will not be stored on the cloud... but for how long?"

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